It just happened that out of their control 1. Apple squeezed them out of ads revenue 2. Market went to shit
I hate Facebook as a company but I don’t see them making strategic mistakes…. Everyone is getting fired everywhere
I'm skeptical. With all their money and knowledge and whatnot, they've only managed to create something that looks like a dated console party game but not more. I don't see how that's the future.
Furthermore, do they expect everyone to buy a... say... $400 headset to use the Metaverse? The low entry barrier was probably one of the biggest reasons for the success of Facebook. If you need specialized equipment nobody will use it.
that's the point of R&D and long shot, if it was possible already it's not a long shot :/
Meta just needs a killer feature for the Metaverse. During the pandemic they bet hard on office-by-VR, but they moved too slowly missed the pandemic and many other deadlines before making a good product.
We'll come back in a few years or decades time to see who will transform the glasses into another platform, just like the watch and the phone did.
Nobody bought an iPhone or iPad because of Facebook. You could also install the Facebook app on that, but you could also use your notebook or your desktop pc or your cheap Android phone or whatnot to use Facebook. Most people already had some "Facebook ready" device at home.
Nobody will buy an Oculus headset if its main/sole use is the Metaverse.
Zuck is betting that more people will use VR in the future, and if you believe that hypothesis then it makes sense to invest infinite money in making sure your company becomes the Apple of VR instead of the Nokia.
How wisely that infinite VR money is being spent is another matter.
The company cannot innovate and has bet the farm on their ability to innovate.
I’ve said it before: Facebook should monetise WhatsApp via payments (real payments, not crypto) and other services. That’s something within their capability and very much within their reach. Maybe they’re seeing that as a backup when VR fails, but the longer they leave it the bigger the risk someone else takes that market.
Marketplace?
software - nope, it's all new, they can't do it
Like, from a margin perspective I get why they didn't want to do this, but it would have been a fantastic hedge against what happened with Apple and would probably have prevented Shopify from ever scaling.